EverythingAuthor(s): Iain Hamilton Grant

Source: The Monist , Vol. 98, No. 2, The New Realism (April, 2015), pp. 156-167
Published by: Oxford University Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/26370744

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The Monist

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The Monist, 2015, 98, 156–167
doi: 10.1093/monist/onv003
Article

Everything
Iain Hamilton Grant*
ABSTRACT
To picture reality either as not involving its being pictured or as reducible to its being
pictured yields inconsistent pictures, since in neither case can anything be pictured.
The picture of reality as picture-involving yields the only consistent picture of reality.
Yet its cost is completeness, and the reason for this is reality. The claim that picturing
reality is involved in reality is idealism, but it is not an idealism that compromises real-
ity’s ontological autonomy. Using Bosanquet’s reality theorem to the effect that
“Everything is real, so long as you do not take it for more than it is,” I argue that ideal-
ism per se is falsely held to vitiate reality’s autonomy. It does so only when the ideal is
awarded an inflated status as fundament or source of reality. Bosanquet’s theorem
makes it clear that inflation of this sort is not exclusively the hallmark of realisms or
idealisms. Since by contrast the idealist is additionally realist concerning the ideal,
fundamentalist and/or spontaneist ontologies become importantly exclusivist,
yielding pictures that cannot picture picturing without inflation of either picturing
capacities or unpictured reality. Therefore the picture of reality as picture-involving is
alone able to account for picturing. If there is picturing then, I claim, real realism is
inflationary.

Disputing with the neorealists of his day concerning their overvaluation of one aspect
of reality at the expense of others, the idealist philosopher Bernard Bosanquet offers
the following corrective: “Everything is real, so long as you do not take it for more
than it is.”1 Bosanquet’s is not an existential permissivism à la Quine, but places epi-
stemic events in reality such that the former are dependent on the latter. If
Bosanquet is an idealist his case serves to remind us that idealism is not per se antire-
alism. Talk of everything is not all there is to everything, nor, qua talk, exclusive of it.
Neither exclusively the character of everything nor exclusive of that character, talk of
“everything,” or conceiving reality, is that feature of reality without which its conceiv-
ing is rendered impossible from the outset. Thus, an idealist such as Bosanquet is
alone capable of providing a coherent account of reality because the idealist is in the
happy position of acknowledging the additional reality of the idea without subjecting
it to the special inflation against which his reality theorem warns.
Taken thus, the theorem measures “takings as” or epistemic claims against the
“everything” in which they feature. Yet in undertaking the recommended assessment,

*University of the West of England, Bristol

C The Author 2015. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Hegeler Institute.
V
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 Everything  157

it is clear that “everything” is similarly subject to overvaluation or special inflation.

That is, should “everything” be itself subject to epistemic claims or “takings as,” it be-
comes, by virtue of being so conceived, “less than” the everything amongst which it
figures. Conversely, “takings as” are themselves inalienably features of the everything
in which they occur. In consequence, if we take “everything” to determine a concept
of reality and add that in reality, special inflation occurs, then the everything in which
such inflation occurs is subject in turn to special inflation, yielding as its outcome
that reality is either unequal to itself, or that special inflation does not occur in it.
Since the latter is expressly denied by the theorem, the attempt to conceive reality as
everything results in the assertion that reality is not equal to reality and so renders
reality inconceivable.
If as recommended reality is not taken as the concept of reality but as the environ-
ment against which special inflation is assessed, the recursive operation, described
above, of special inflation on that environment does not render conceptual articula-
tion insuperable, but shows reality to be generally inflationary, or importantly nonfi-
nal with respect to form. In what follows, I will take this assessment stratagem to
assess claims concerning fundamentality and spontaneity. These stand, respectively
but not exclusively, for realist and antirealist points of issuance: either reality issues
from its fundaments, or ontology is spontaneous or evanescent. Against both I will
argue for a nonfinalist or inflationary realism without which no real conceivings can
feature in reality. To talk of everything is therefore not exclusive of the talk about ev-
erything that is a feature of it. The only alternative for a realist to talk of everything
is either to talk of nothing at all, or to take the everything that is the object of such
talk to be the singular reality.
Thus, while it may seem odd to begin an account of realism with an idealist’s
word on the subject, this oddness arises only owing to a false account of idealism.
The false account stipulates that idealism is an antirealism insofar as it excludes from
its catalogue of reals the standard features of the physical cosmos asserted by the vast
majority of realists to constitute the fundamental nature of reality. This is necessary
in order to make the claim that the ideal is more real than the material, or in extreme
cases that matter enjoys no reality whatsoever, which positions are said to constitute
idealism. Bosanquet’s is however a realism not vitiated by exclusion—everything is
according to the hypothesis real. To exclude something from everything—whether
the idea from the perspective of the physical realist or matter from that of the elimi-
native idealist—entails either a commitment to a class of entities whose sole com-
mon characteristic is that they do not exist, or a commitment to a realism
concerning the only location wherein the discrimination of reals from unreals may
take place, that is, a realism asserting the insuperability of the concept. For the con-
cept therefore the concept itself has a greater extension than is satisfied by reals
alone, precisely insofar as it enables the discrimination of unreals. In this sense the
concept of reality is more than reality. Yet if the concept of reality is tested according
to Bosanquet’s theorem, it emerges that the concept of reality, as a feature of reality,
is less than reality. From this one sense of what Bosanquet warns against as “taking
for more than” may be gained, namely the inflation of the concept as that feature of
reality that is unilaterally greater than the reality it conceives.

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158  Everything

Since Bosanquet’s idealism gives reality as the environment within which conceiv-
ings of reality, specially inflationary or otherwise, occur, it provides that account of
reality within which alone conceivings of reality are themselves conceivable. Since
moreover, the theorem counters any “takings as” of some X for more than X is, it
will reject as a false account any takings of the concept, idea, or proposition as exclu-
sively real, since such takings as manifestly take one feature in reality to be more
than it is, or to be equivalent to reality.
For this reason idealism is in the position of theorising theorisings of reality as
real occurrences, and therefore amounts not to a special claim that reality is ideally
constituted, or spontaneously issuant from its being conceived, but rather to an
additional realism concerning takings as, ideas, concepts, or propositions.
This affords a picture of reality within reality, for which reason it will not provide
a finished picture of reality, but one in which its picturing features as an episode in it.
That the universe is precisely the sort of thing within which conceivings of it are re-
ally occurrent is exemplified by the Illustris programme.2 Illustris provides a hydrody-
namically modelled simulation not of the universe as it is, but of the process by
which it has come to be what it is. While the results of this simulated process bear
striking resemblance to the distribution and types of galactic structures in the uni-
verse, a complete simulation of the process would ex hypothesi include, at a higher
level of detail, the process by which the universe came to be simulated. Since this
would be itself a simulation, however, completeness of finality of form would entail
that the process by which this second-order simulation is attained be part of that ad-
ditional simulation in turn, and so on. This does not show the project of picturing,
simulating or conceiving the process to fail, but rather that real picturing is insupera-
bly additive to the reality so pictured.
In this sense Bosanquet offers a challenge to realist and antirealist picturing that
seek either to eliminate the source of the picture from the picture, or that seek to re-
duce what is pictured to a feature of the medium in which picturing is alone possible.

1 . T HE TO P O L O G Y OF I M P O S S I B L E P I C T U R E S
If an idealist is a philosopher committed to the reality of the idea, and if the idealist
is not eliminativist in consequence of admitting the reality of the idea, we may give
the following definition of idealism: the idealist is additionally a realist concerning
the idea. The problem addressed above concerning the inflation of one element of
reality (namely the idea) over others, is a problem of logical topology. The idealist’s
logical topology contrasts with the famous “view from nowhere” (Nagel3) or the
self-eliminating “side-ways-on picture” (McDowell4) in that it offers the prospect of
a view on the real that is itself part of the real insofar as the idea, for the idealist, is
not something to the unreality of which the idealist must be committed. The reality
of the idea, however, is not the same as the reality of Rosetta’s probe Philae landing on
Comet 67P. It is not the same, that is, except insofar as they are reals. Or, the idea is
not equivalent to reality because the real in the idea is also the real in the comet.
McDowell’s “sideways-on picture” is designed to show that a conceiving of reality
outside the concept of reality can only be gained by deploying precisely the concep-
tual capacities withdrawn in principle from a reality outside the concept.

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 Everything  159

Accordingly, the conceiving of such an extra-conceptual reality is manifestly self-

contradictory. It follows that the sum of reality—McDowell’s “the world”—becomes
wholly “embraceable” in thought.5 What starts as an attempt to picture what lies
outside the picture ends by eliminating such an externality with the result that
conceiving a reality that involves conceptual capacities is achieved at the cost of the
elimination of that reality. What reality there is now issues from the picturing of it.
The function this argument fulfils is to transfer responsibility for the world from the
world to its spontaneous issuance from the conceptual capacities that are insuperably
involved when it is conceived. Thus spontaneity now qualifies ontology, or the cost
of the acceptance of the reality of conceptual capacities is precisely reality as such.
Yet, the resultant conceptual space has therefore fewer dimensions than the object it
was the task of the concept to conceive.
In contrast, the “nonperspectival” or the view from “nowhere” is an attempt to
avoid inflecting the reality so viewed with the machinations of mind involved in its
viewing. It constitutes in this sense an attempt to acknowledge the “ontological au-
tonomy” of reality with respect to the concept.6 However, by not acknowledging the
additional dimensions of the concept, or reducing these dimensions to zero (no-
where, non-perspectival), the means by which reality’s autonomy is to be conceived
precisely cannot be involved in the conceiving. The common deficit of both pictures
is that reality suffers a reduction in its dimensions as a result of the invention of the
concept. It is for this reason that the idealist, who is one when s/he is committed to
the reality of the idea, enjoys a topological advantage over the foregoing pictures;
namely, that the idea is additionally real entails that the reality thus conceived is aug-
mented by the reality of its being conceived. Accordingly, the idealist manages to
conceive of reality as enjoying the property of being a reality in which its conceiving
can conceivably occur, without reducing reality to its being conceived or rendering
reality inconceivable in principle.
What unites Nagelspace and McDowellspace is their shared insistence on some au-
tonomous or spontaneous instance from which viewing and world respectively issue.
In the latter case for instance, conceptual spontaneity is the ground from which world
as world issues. In the former case the object viewed is autonomous to the extent that
its being viewed as such becomes impossible. In both cases, that is, some primary
division occurs while no account is offered of the background upon which alone the
division is conceivable. The idealist’s topology, by contrast, shows with respect to
conceivings or “takings as” their limitations as arising in consequence of the reality as a
feature of which conceivings occur. That they do so demonstrates the susceptibility of
“everything” to discrimination as well as to the risk of special overvaluation.
For the additional realist, there is therefore at least one part of reality from which
reality as such may be treated. Such parts of reality are standardly called universals.
However, the precise character of the universal remains unclear insofar as it is simply
thought, for example, as maximally available for instantiation, or as that without
which no statement concerning reality may issue at all. Clearly, the additional realist
concerning the idea rejects the standard deflationary move against the universal.
Accordingly, the idealist’s reality includes elements a deflationary realist’s would not.
Consider, for example, the current trend for an “austeric” or merely semantic

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160  Everything

“fundamentality”—what this austeric picture leaves out is everything that is not se-
mantically tractable. By contrast, the additional realist is afforded a larger space. The
realist’s “everything” or realism’s universe includes universals not as autonomous or
spontaneous points of issuance, but rather as iterations of it. For example, if there is
at least one part of the universe in which the universe itself may be conceived, the
universality of the universe is given not as fundament or as autonomous point of
issuance but rather in the iterative focus of a universe in which the conceiving of this
universe occurs.
If accordingly we take it that Bosanquet’s reality is one admitting of the additional
reality of the idea, reality is universal not in the sense of the Parmenides’ big sail but
in the sense that it is maximally iterated, i.e., in everything. It is therefore realist about
the universal and about its worldly character. This means that although maximally
occurrent the universal is not a finalist or all-encompassing entity, but rather a feature
of any universe in which, for example, its conceiving is conceivably occurrent. The re-
ality theorems’ emphasis on the conditional character of this reality, however, entails
that it is additionally fragile: everything is vulnerable to an extension which, in reality
it does not admit. Bosanquet’s realism may therefore be characterised as recom-
mending an ontologically distributive justice.
There are two ways in which “everything” is fragile. Firstly, if we take “everything”
to be the singular character of reality then “everything” becomes a contrastive case,
not internally, but only with respect to some “not everything” now environing it.
That is to say, should the everything be taken as itself discriminable, it is at once
taken for simultaneously more and less than it is; more than, because in addition to
the reality of everything that is, everything itself is conceived as enjoying discrete re-
ality. Less than therefore in that such a “singular everything” now becomes less than
the everything amongst which it features. The second sense in which everything is
fragile is therefore epistemic; that is to say, everything is real as long as it is not taken
for more than it is, for example, when some element of reality is inflated such that it
becomes the fundament of ground of all others.
To take a well-known example of such inflation, consider Berkeley’s metaphysical
realism concerning the percept. He is not, that is, denying that reality obtains but
rather asserting that it consists fundamentally of percepts. Here the “taking as more
than” consists not in the inflation of percepts but rather in their equation with reality
as such. Reality is guaranteed to occur given only its character as single uninterrupted
instance of perception. While few realists, however austeric, would deny that per-
cepts furnish part of reality, most would reject that reality as such is a continuous
uninterrupted perception episode; but to decry it as antirealist mistakes both the pur-
port of the thesis and the selective overinflation that characterises its error.
We thus have some sense of what “taking as more than” entails. However, surely
the problem of realism consists in positively characterising the manner in which this
taking as “more than” is more than? Why, in other words, is this ontologically distribu-
tive justice subject at all to the epistemic misadventure of being taken as more than?
The question as to what then “more than” is more than invokes the problem of
identity. If we argue that taking X as more than X or assert that X does not equal
X, is false, we might argue that X does not equal X just when some entity is

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 Everything  161

falsely understood. Yet this is to take singulars as the gauge of epistemic misadven-
ture, whereas the reality theorem has “everything” as the measure of special inflation.
If, remaining within the problematic of the universal, we characterize the particular
as an iteration of a universal, then reality—“everything”—comprises maximal itera-
tion of the universal. The particularity of the particular would accordingly be the par-
tial arrest of a series. In this case, we encounter the problem of what “more than” is
more than in two ways. Firstly, a particular is taken as more than it is, precisely when
it is taken as independent of or as grounding the series of its iterations. Thus
secondly, the particular is taken as more than it is when all its iterations are concen-
trated in that particular, or when it is taken as the universal.
Again then, we might argue that a particular is determined by identity of spatio-
temporal location. Yet, if this is so, then this X here now is not identical with that X
there then; in consequence, the event identified as “taking as more than” consists
again in extracting particularity from the series constitutive of it. Therefore we can-
not conceive “taking more than” as consisting in exceeding the identity of the feature
thus taken. Rather, the identity of the feature thus taken is itself, on this reading, an
instance of “taking as more than,” that is, in extracting it from the everything in
which it has its reality. Accordingly, the misunderstanding of some X as not equal to
X is itself an unavoidable feature of an everything in which conceiving X as X occurs.
This must be the case if mistaking the character of some X, i.e., error, is possible at
all. Since, according to the theorem, error is possibly occurrent, it follows that in-
stances of special inflation figure amongst everything, and are therefore subject to
the same caveat. In this case, according to Bosanquet’s formula, these instances of
special inflation must themselves be judged real.
Yet this seems to affirm what the worldly law denies, namely, that illicit inflation
is real. The law, however, in fact covers this case. If “taking as more than” is a feature
of the world (for various reasons, Bosanquet argues that it is), this is the real function
of epistemic misadventure. In both cases the mistake is to assume that the reality X
designates may be cashed out in terms of real particulars, or that the laws of under-
standing are laws of things, that “everything” is equivalent to every thing. Recalling
that, according to the theorem, “everything” is the measure of reality and, more spe-
cifically, of special inflation, while it admits of discrimination, everything does not as-
sert the means of discriminability to consist in things, but rather, in conjunction with
the negative condition of reality, that the precondition of special inflation is the over-
identification of the logical X with some particular bearer of it. In short, the theorem
warns against such identification as itself an instance of the special inflation of some
fundamental character of reality because, while affording discriminability, “everything”
by definition resists bottoming out in some specific character. The first instance of
special inflation therefore to be considered is fundamentality.

2. FUNDAMENTALITY
“Real X is more than real X” occurs most flagrantly in fundamentality talk. From ev-
erything, some X is extracted and given the function of fundamentality with respect
to everything else. In general terms, this is like Goethe empirically discovering the
primal plant from which all plants issue amongst plants in general. For if it is a

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162  Everything

candidate fundamental plant, its candidacy is flatly contradicted by its availability. If it

is available therefore it is not that plant from which all plants issue, the “plantish”
ground of all plants, and so begs rather than answers the question of what it is from
which all plants issue.
If some candidate fundamentality is discovered, what makes it a candidate funda-
mental is that it serves as ground for its consequents and, if fundamental as such,
then for all consequents. Any such candidate fundamental, once identified, is subject
to the same problem Goethe’s discovery of the primal plant demonstrates. That is,
that some X satisfying fundamentality can be identified from among all X’s renders
its candidacy for fundamentality moot. Should any candidate fundamentality satisfier,
or principle of sufficient reason arise, it is question begging, since rather than answer-
ing the demand for a reason for what is and how it is, it causes the question to be re-
posed. This is not least because there are no nondisputable fundamentality
candidates. John Foster, for example, engages in an illustrative dispute with physical-
ist fundamentalism.7 He does not dispute that fundamentality occurs, but only its
character. Arguing that there can be no physical fundamentals, since if something is
physical it is by definition derived, or a late acquisition of the universe in which it oc-
curs, Foster argues accordingly for the fundamentality of the nonphysical, the exten-
sion of which is correspondingly broader than merely the opposite of obtaining
physicals. The question as to which of these positions might be considered realist is
dependent upon accounts of what it is that reality fundamentally consists in.
Accordingly, neither party in this dispute is arguing that reality does not occur, but
only disputes the character of a reality that is indisputably occurrent.
Theodore Sider is aware of the problem of overdetermining the type of any candi-
date fundamentality.8 He therefore invests “structure” with fundamentality.
Structure, he argues, is fundamental. He thus avoids overdetermining structure as be-
longing to any particular metaphysical account of reality’s consistency. However,
structure may be argued to be fundamental in two senses: firstly, structure may be
fundamental in that it is always occurrent. If always occurrent however structure
would rather be universal than fundamental in virtue of its maximal ubiquity.
Secondly, structure may be said to be fundamental because structure obtains when-
ever there is something rather than nothing. In this latter case, fundamentality of
structure must be an acquired characteristic only once something exists. In this sense,
structure becomes fundamental. “Becoming fundamental” is not a property of funda-
mentals but of consequents. That is, should some X obtain, it will be just X until
something is consequent upon it. Only when something is consequent upon it, is it
fundamental. If, by contrast, it is always there, or fundamentality is fundamentality in
itself or from the outset, then it is Platonic, in the sense that it is what it is regardless
of its issuing in consequent instances.
Fundamentality is either (a) eternal, in which case it is neither fundament nor
apex, neither first nor last, but that which renders these impossible; or (b) first in a
series consequently upon that series obtaining, so that, as Aristotle had it, its actuality
will lie in the power of its consequent.9 In this sense, it is fundamental to fundamen-
tality that it ceases to be nonfundamental only when nonfundamentals—conse-
quents or derivatives—issue from it.

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 Everything  163

It emerges then that fundamentality is not eternally but only centrally fundamen-
tal. To what is fundamentality central if it is fundamental? It must be fundamental to
everything. To what parts of everything? If fundamentality is central, i.e., conse-
quently occurrent depending on the fact of consequents, then fundamentality is cen-
tral not in the everything but in each. The problem then of the identification or
isolation of any candidate fundamental is precisely that it is a candidate plucked from
everything to serve as fundament for everything. In this sense, it precisely illustrates
the Bosanquetian problem of taking some X for more than it is.
What then are the prospects for fundamentality? Here again Bosanquet’s reality
theorem is helpful, since the “taking X as more than” is contrasted not with what X
is in itself, but with everything. If everything is real, provided that it is not taken for
more than it is, what is at issue is not the identification of what it is that whatever
happens to be is, but precisely its contrast with a reality within which this taking as
more than must feature. Thus even if it is conceded that fundamentality is so to
speak central rather than prior, whatever it is that is fundamental must remain less
than everything. If this is not the case then discriminability of fundamentals is a priori
impossible.
That fundamentality, if it obtains at all, can only obtain consequently or in the
middle, alerts us to an additional problem concerning the identification of fundaments
as opposed for example to their isolation. If the identification of a fundament serves
as the basis of an epistemological project, namely to know what it is that is funda-
mental, then from this identified fundamental an ontology will issue. Curiously there-
fore, when the identification of fundamentality as prior is at issue it is so at the cost
of its exclusion from the ontology that will be consequent upon it. Recalling that the
equivalents of “everything” to every thing rests on the identification of logical laws
with real bearers the question of the fundamentality of some particular reveals an ad-
ditional dimension of this same amphiboly. If logical priority is taken as conferring
authority of issuance, candidate fundamentals, as logically and ontologically prior to
their consequents, become that part of reality from which reality itself issues. This is
as clearly the case whether we are dealing with physical or with nonphysical candi-
date fundamentals, as John Foster argues. It thus reveals a second case of special in-
flation, namely spontaneity.

3. S P ON TA N EO US ON TO LO GY
Maurizio Ferraris has identified the priority of epistemology over ontology as the ge-
netic type of antirealisms dominant in the last century.10 Although this inverted pri-
ority may be attributed to Kant, it is not restricted to that one instance, and nor does
it qualify reducibly “Continental” positions as antirealist. The same error, for exam-
ple, is evident in Quine to the extent that ontology is to be the output of epistemo-
logical procedures ratified by the best of our natural sciences. The issue here is the
same as in the case of fundamentality: it concerns the isolation of a point of issuance.
In this sense, epistemology is prior to ontology just if knowing is the source of being;
as Kant had it, “he who would know the world must first manufacture it.”11 Yet it fol-
lows from this that knowing is no longer a feature of being since being is a feature of
knowing. This is necessarily false because either the knowing from which being

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164  Everything

issues is, in which case it is not true that being issues from knowing since knowing
already is; or, the knowing from which being issues is not, in which case again it is
not true that being issues from knowing. In both cases the assertion therefore denies
what it asserts.
In the present context, however, what is of note are the structural features that
“being issuing from knowing” shares with the problem of “taking as more than,” or
isolable fundamentality. In both cases, what is at stake is the isolation of a source of
issuance. In the case of transcendental philosophy, this is ultimately alibied by the
causal autonomy of the rational agent which, to be consistent, entails the general in-
flation of the moral case: if it is true that reason enjoys an extension in its practical
use greater than in its theoretical, then theoretical reason is implicitly a subset of rea-
son in general which is tasked as the population of the world with spontaneity. Yet if
theoretical reason—reasoning concerning the metaphysical character of the world—
is a subset of practical reason then reason will not be satisfied with a world that
merely features spontaneity. Accordingly it follows from the primacy of practical rea-
son not merely that instances of causal autonomy occur, but rather that such instance
must theoretically be universalised: “the whole universe ought to be . . . .”12
The same is also the case if as Feyerabend argues “grammar contains cosmogony”
or if ontology is evanescent.13 In each case, that is, the identification or isolation of a
source of issuance entails the consequent character of being, leaving whatever it is
that is antecedent to these consequents excluded from being and accordingly
self-refuting.
If therefore the thesis that being issues from knowing, or ontology from episte-
mology, and if fundamentality is, if it is at all a lately acquired feature of a universe
that acquires it, then it follows that knowing issues from being just if being is. The
character of this priority turns out not to be fundamental but central: being is not
the same as thinking, but the reality in being is the reality in thinking. And this entails
being an additional realist concerning the idea. It thus serves to locate the idea not in
its own space but in space as such.

4 . S P A C E AN D L OC U S
What then may be said of the shape of the space of reality? If reality is everything
that is and if some shape occurs, it will not be the shape of everything that occurs—
the fundamental shape if you will—but rather one feature in everything. We thus
move from a simple “prior to the first layer” model of fundamentality to a universe
populated by universes.
From what standpoint can I know this? In Nagelspace: nowhere. I noted above
that this was a poor division by virtue of its self-eliminating character. The attempt
to find a standpoint from which reality as such will issue, or as Kit Fine has it, to step
“outside reality” in order to conceive it as such, is precisely the attempt to give reality
in itself a finished form or a space separated from reality and from which reality as
such has that form.14 Here again at issue is the identification of a prior or fundamen-
tal point of issuance from which the concept of reality will issue. Yet the isolation of
real space from conceptual space makes this issuance impossible. While not therefore
arguing that being issues from knowing, the fundamentality or ontological autonomy

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 Everything  165

that reality as reality must enjoy ensures the latter is unviolated by conceptual machi-
nations at the cost of excluding conceptual machinations from it. Therefore, the view
from nowhere or the concept of reality as such conceived from outside of reality
presents the epistemic adventurer in such spaces with impossible voyages, precisely
because in both cases real space is not held to contain conceptual space. In other
words, the problem with Nagelspace is that, by its own account, it isn’t there. By not
being there it cannot account for the space it constructs.
In McDowellspace by contrast the standpoint from which reality may be con-
ceived occurs in conceptual space alone. Even if the world pictured sideways-on is in-
deed the world, it is so only after having been conceptually pictured, and so cannot
escape the pressureless embrace of thought. In this picture epistemology is first phi-
losophy if there are concepts at all. Moreover, since conceptual capacities are neces-
sarily involved in discriminating employment instances of conceptual capacities,
epistemology or conceptual space is the only space there is. This is classic down-
stream only constructivism: McDowell’s world is indeed, like Hegel’s nature, the fall-
ing away from itself of the idea.15 Yet insofar as instances of the employment of
conceptual capacities occur, the metaphysics of the world embraced in thought does
not resolve the question of the priority of epistemology relative to ontology, or of
the pictured world as related to an unpictured one, but merely postpones and there-
fore begs it.
If Nagelspace is accidentally eliminative of conceptual space from real space,
McDowellspace is deliberately eliminative of the concept of extra conceptual space.
For this reason we may call McDowell’s an eliminative idealism.16 If by contrast the
idealist may be characterized as an additional realist concerning the idea, then the
cost of the inclusion of the addition of the idea to reality is the nonfinality of form
that reality accordingly suffers. Even if a concept of reality occurs within reality and
gives reality a final shape, there is no final conceiving of having conceived this finally
shaped reality that includes this final shaping in itself. Therefore, being an additional
realist concerning the idea is to be a nonfinalist concerning reality or, what amounts
to the same, being an inflationary realist.
If conceptual space is neither taken to eliminate real space, nor to be spontaneously
productive of it, nor yet to be incommunicably isolated from it, then we are left with
the following articulation of the relation between real and conceptual space.
Conceptual space is occurrent in real space just if real space is susceptible of discrimi-
nation. In turn, real space is so susceptible just if discrimination is occurrent. If then
the idea is additionally real then not only is the concept part of reality, albeit not all of
reality; but reality, in addition to environing the concepts occurrent in it, is additionally
real as those concepts. Realism therefore remains problematic only so long as concep-
tual space is conceptually isolable from real space rather than a creature of it. Such isol-
ability entails a one-layer primal fundamentality thesis. Yet consider for a moment
what it is that conceptual space and real space share. If the one bounds or divides from
the other in any respect, then qua space they are continuous. The isolability of concep-
tual space takes place in space that is as yet conceptually undiscriminated, and is there-
fore itself an instance of the special inflation against which Bosanquet warns, and the

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166  Everything

cost of this special inflation is the obfuscation of continuity by the creation of in-
principle discrete spaces between which transition is accordingly impossible.
It may be objected that this is merely to think of the relation between the idea
and reality from the perspective of the idea, in other words that this is simply a ver-
sion of the argument of the sideways-on view that McDowell mounts. Yet this would
be to mistake the reality of a conceptual space continuous with real space for an
equation of the two, or it would be to give reality the fundamental character of
thought. This is why the idealist is additionally, not exclusively a realist concerning the
idea. The continuity of real with conceptual space entails that conceptual space is
not spontaneously issuant but rather itself contoured and articulated by the every-
thing in which it occurs. As the nature philosopher Schelling put it, “what thinks in
me is what is in the objective world.”17 In other words, it is not merely the case that
conceptual space is continuous with a real space as though thinking occupies only
one side of this division. Rather, it is precisely amongst everything that thinking oc-
curs as an additional feature in which thinking can be though as occurrent at all.
Moreover, the thinking that occurs is itself a feature of this reality such that the real-
ity in the comet is the reality in the idea. What inflationary realism recommends
therefore is not that realism seek to bridge a notional distance between reality and its
concept, but rather that the conceiving is itself an additional rearticulation of a reality
that, far from being distant from it, is what is active in it. If having an issuant source
of ontology within an ontology qualifies a position as antirealist, realism consists in
an ontology that issues in epistemic episodes, which episodes in turn conceive prior-
ity only in its consequents.

N O T ES
1. Bosanquet, The Principle of Individuality and Value (London: Macmillan, 1912), 240. Bosanquet’s specific
claim against the neorealists of his era is the overvaluation of objects, in the following sense: “neo-
realism . . . treat[s] ‘things’ as not merely actual and individual constituents of the real universe, but as
existents which unite in their own private existence, by themselves and apart from connection with each
other and with percipients, all those features which they present to thought and perception.” In other
words, the neorealist proposes first, that things are self-containing; and second therefore, that their
involvements are self-limited. See The Meeting of Extremes in Contemporary Philosophy (London:
Macmillan, 1921), 128.
2. Shy Genel et al., “Introducing the Illustris Project: The Evolution of Galaxy Populations across Cosmic
Time,” MNRAS 445.1 (November 2014), 175–200. This provides belated support for Thales.
3. Thomas Nagel, The View from Nowhere (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1986).
4. John McDowell, Mind and World (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), 35, 82.
5. Ibid., 33.
6. Nicholas Rescher, Understanding Nature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 102.
7. John Foster, The Case for Idealism (London: Routledge and Keegan Paul, 1982), see especially
chapter 2.
8. Theodore Sider, Writing the Book of the World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).
9. Aristotle, De Anima, 414b29–30.
10. Maurizio Ferraris, Goodbye, Kant! What Still Stands of the Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Richard Davies
(Albany: SUNY, 2013), especially chapter 5.
11. Immanuel Kant, Opus postumum, trans. Eckart Förster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 240.
12. J.G. Fichte, Praktische Philosophie (1795), in Fichte-Gesammtausgabe der Bayerischen Akademie der
Wissenschaften [GA] (Stuttgart-Bad Canstatt: Frommann Holzboog, 1962–), GA II/3, 249.

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 Everything  167

13. As recounted in Paul Feyerabend, Naturphilosophie (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2009), 89, citing Whorf:
“According to Whorf . . . the grammar of a language contains a cosmology,” so that language “is not just
an instrument for describing reality but forms it.” See also Hilary Putnam, “Reflections on Goodman’s
Ways of Worldmaking,” The Journal of Philosophy 76.11 (1979), 603–18, where he gives a diagnosis of
the necessary subservience of Nelson Goodman’s evanescent ontology to the Good, as articulated in
Goodman’s “Notes on the Well-Made World,” Erkenntnis 19.1 (1983), 99–107.
14. Kit Fine, “The Question of Realism,” Philosophers’ Imprint 1.1 (2001), 1–30, www.philosophersimprint.
org/001001/.
15. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Philosophy of Nature, trans A.V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1970), 17.
16. See Jeremy Dunham, Iain Hamilton Grant, and Sean Watson, Idealism. History of a Philosophy
(Stocksfield: Acumen, 2011); and Iain Hamilton Grant, Philosophies of Nature after Schelling (London:
Continuum, 2006), especially Chapter 3.
17. Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, System der Weltalter (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1998), 49 (my
translation).

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